Insidious: The Last Key

It was my birthday in 2011 when I had all my friends gather in my home theater to watch Insidious. No doubt, that was one scary movie and everyone had a rollicking good time. Flash forward two sequels later, and a third sequel screened in the cinema in 2018, I feel like the Insidious series has to be wrapped and shut down, never to be visited again. The Last Key should be The Last Insidious Movie Ever!

With none of the original cast from the first movie (except for a quick flashback scene, which basically sets up this movie as a lead up to Insidious the first part), The Last Key primarily focuses on Elise, the woman who helped the family sort out the demonic haunting that affected the family’s son. We get to see Elise’s childhood– with one actually very horrifying scene with her father disciplining Elise in a traumatic manner- and how she learns she has a gift to see into The Further. It is only her mother who understands Elise’s predicament but is helpless from controlling her husband from abusing their daughter.

After one extremely disturbing incident, Elise runs away from home, abandoning her younger brother and father.

The movie is set in 2010. Elise receives a call from a man who claims his house is haunted. Elise initially refuses to take on the job but when she hears that the house is her childhood home, she decides to take up the job to finish the matter for once and for all, and to spare us viewers from watching yet another installment.

While searching out for the ghost in the house, it turns out the man who made a call is hiding another secret, which Elise and her Spectral Sightings team member, Imogen and Specs, uncover, leading to a resolution of the so-called haunting. However, all is not well, as Elise discover the ghosts are still there and she needs to venture into The Further.

Things get complicated when her brother arrives on the scene, and he’s pretty mad at his sister for abandoning her. However, Elise tries to patch things up by giving him a picture of a whistle which he used to use to scare away the demons as a child. Things get nasty when Elise’s brother and daughters go to the house to look for the whistle, where one daughter is tempted by the demon and is taken, hostage. Elise has a vision of this moment and rushes to the house to rescue her niece.

What follows is Elise’s adventure into The Further and attempts to rescue her niece, seek forgiveness from her mother and battle the demon, who uses the ‘keys’ to lock up his victim’s throats and all. As the movie tagline says: ‘scream before it silences you.’ Instead, we wanted to scream to stop making such movies.

Unfortunately, the movie relies a little bit too much on jump scares. It’s fine the first few times, but after a while, it’s like a meh moment. We get used to it and the scare factor goes way down. Secondly, the minute we see the monster, we lose all element of fear and horror and it just becomes very schlocky. By the end of the movie, our collective reaction was: why did they even make this movie? I remember when The Conjuring Part 2 came out, and that was indeed a very solid sequel, which surpassed its original part. Same case with Annabelle: Creation. The Last Key, being part 4, is sadly a not-needed sequel.

I would recommend to go watch the first part or watch The Conjuring. Or if you don’t have time, just watch the trailer for this movie and that should suffice.

Sigh. When will they start making decent horror movies that don’t rely on unnecessary back stories and jump scares?